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and killed in any war to protect the “balance”) precludes our viewing them as counters to
be traded off in the present against some speculative future gain. That point is fair
enough, but it doesn’t precisely meet the difficulty because the arguments for preventive
war are exactly the same as the arguments for recognizing a right to neutrality: each state
has a right to decide for itself what constitutes a “sufficient threat” (the converse of what
constitutes aggression), and each state has a right to decide for itself how much risk it is
prepared to bear for the sake of international order.
To summarize this part of the argument, we conclude that the fundamental
difficulties in Walzer’s account of jus ad bellum derive from his insufficient appreciation
of the distance separating domestic from international society. Walzer rightly modifies
the theory of aggression constructed around the legalist’s model of international order to
account for the disanalogies created by the fact of the state’s collective character, but he
does not sufficiently attend to the deeper and more significant consequences of the facts
of distributed authority and distributed power. Walzer resists attributing too much
significance to these facts seemingly in order to avoid the consequences of viewing
international society as a Hobbsian state of nature. Before proposing our alternative to
the Hobbesian and “Kantian” views of international society, let us first note the parallel
difficulties that arise in Walzer’s theory of jus in bello.
The demands of jus in bello and Walzer’s rejection of realism
Walzer’s account of jus in bello begins with a movement away from realism. As
he observes, the domestic analogy offers no normative guidance about how to conduct
military operations because there is no equivalent to the activity of war within civil
Convention